I never thought I would sue the state I have lived in my whole life. But standing outside El Cajon City Hall, I announced that our city is taking California Attorney General Rob Bonta to court. It might be one of the most important official acts of my life.

Here is the moment that brought us here.

A few months ago, the federal Department of Homeland Security contacted our city with a list of names and addresses of children who may be living unsupervised in unsafe conditions alongside illegal alien adults. Knowing the prevalence of human trafficking in this region, we were gravely concerned about the wellbeing of these kids. We asked the attorney general’s office a simple question: could El Cajon police conduct welfare checks on these children who are potentially in danger? The answer from the Attorney General's office was essentially "no"– not if our officers wanted to remain compliant with California law. The AG’s office told us that doing those welfare checks would violate Senate Bill 54, the state's sanctuary law.

I'M A MAYOR TRYING TO FOLLOW LAW BUT CALIFORNIA IS MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR COPS

Read that again. The state told a city of 110,000 people that its police officers could not check on potentially endangered children simply because doing so may expose the addresses of illegal aliens.

That is the opposite of public safety – it is moral collapse.

I am the Mayor of a working-class border city ten miles from Mexico. My residents are nurses, teachers, mechanics, veterans, small business owners. They pay their taxes. They follow the law. They expect the people they elect to do the same. When Sacramento tells our police they cannot cooperate with federal authorities to protect children, every parent in California should be alarmed.

Here is what California has built. The state’s sanctuary laws prohibit local police from working with federal immigration enforcement. On top of that, the state hands out driver's licenses to people here illegally. It hands out in-state college tuition. It hands out disability benefits. The state government brags about all of it on official websites.

Federal law makes it a felony to encourage or induce someone to reside in this country unlawfully. California is doing exactly that.

Our lawsuit, filed by the America First Policy Institute, asks a court to answer one question: which law reigns supreme? Federal law or state law? The Constitution settled this in 1788. The Supremacy Clause is not a suggestion. It is the foundation of the country. And we want the courts to make it official with respect to California’s sanctuary laws.

Other cities have tried to affect this outcome using different laws. Huntington Beach went to federal court last year and lost. But our case is different. We are not arguing about state resources or state funding. We are arguing that California's entire sanctuary regime – the licenses, the tuition, the benefits – was designed to induce illegal residence in violation of federal criminal law. That argument has not been tested. It deserves to be.

It is likely to be a long, hard-fought battle. If California's courts don’t settle the score, we’re fully prepared to see this case all the way through to the United States Supreme Court. The necessity of answering this question cannot be overstated.

Attorney General Bonta has already told the press that El Cajon should prepare for another loss. He says our lawsuit is a baseless attack. He claims SB 54 makes Californians safer.

Tell that to the children this law is endangering.

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This is not a Republican issue or a Democrat issue. It is a rule of law issue. When the state hands out benefits explicitly designed to attract people across the border illegally, something has gone wrong. When police officers go to work every day knowing they will break either federal law or state law before lunch, something has gone wrong.

El Cajon is a small city. We do not have Sacramento's budget or its lobbyists or its political machine. What we have is a City Council that voted to follow federal immigration law, a community that backed us, and a Constitution that still means what it says.

The American Dream is not a sanctuary policy. It is the promise that we live under one set of laws, applied fairly to everyone. That promise is worth defending. So we are defending it.

California's leaders made a choice. They chose to protect their politics over our police, our residents, and vulnerable kids. In a courtroom in San Diego County, El Cajon made a different choice. We chose the law.